Certainly the writer favoured the jovial life. Food and wine flow in his pages like milk and honey in Canaan. There is no room in his house for the Puritans, not even, apparently, in the bringing up of his child. "Those that frequent Mr Baxter's Puritanical Holding-forth" must be merry when they come to his feast. He will have no _Catechizing of Families_--a discourse published by Richard Baxter in this very year 1683; and the only _Compassionate Counsel_--a Baxter pamphlet of 1681--he is likely to offer to young men is to take life lightly, as his hero does, and above all, not to marry. For that is the true point of this lively piece of irony (the irony is less well sustained in the sequel, _The Confession of the New Married Couple_, and dropped altogether in the bitter _Letter_ at the end of _The Ten Pleasures_). It is a savage attack upon women--upon (to quote a Rabelaisian sentence) "the quarrelsome, crabbed, lavish, proud, opinionated, domineering and unbridled nature of the female sex." Women, he says, "are in effect of less value than old Iron, Boots and Shoes, etc., for we find both Merchants and money ready always to buy those commodities." The analogy is an unfortunate one, for one of his implications is that women can easily be bought. But he--if it is a "he"--is in deadly earnest. Love, marriage, he asks scornfully--what are they? A romance, are they? The true happiness of life? Very well: here are the pleasures of them. You will be in love and make a match--and look at all the worry of the settlement, in which, by the way, you may often be defrauded. You will get married--a fine ceremony, with a fine feast; and all the nasty old women of the neighbourhood will come and tell bawdy stories to enliven the occasion. You get married, and thereafter you are at the mercy of your wife, who will indulge your wishes or not as suits her mood. Your house will be all awry if she has but a slight headache. When the baby comes, the place will be filled with old women and baby-linen and medical apparatus, and you will have all the anxieties of a father added to the discomforts of a neglected husband. For the rest, your wife will know how "to cuckold, jilt, and sham" as well as any gay lady of Covent Garden. And so on.